NASA has turned on Hall electric engines on Psyche, a spacecraft that is now smoothly moving towards the rich metal celestial body of the same name in the asteroid belt beyond Mars. The agency reports that Psyche is currently in "full cruise mode," six months after launching on October 13, 2023, on a SpaceX rocket.
Earlier, NASA used Psyche for the first time in the agency's history to test laser communication in deep space. The spacecraft released a communication beam to Earth from a distance of about 16 million km. It is expected that by 2029 it will reach its target and namesake, the asteroid Psyche, and will orbit it for two years, observing and sending data. Scientists suspect that Psyche is actually the embryonic core of a planet, or a planetesimal.
The ion engine is relatively new yet old enough for NASA. The agency was working on this technology even before American astronauts first flew to the Moon. The first ion engine was tested in 1964.
The engine has no moving parts - it creates thrust by exciting xenon particles that are repelled and exit the engine. There are many different types of ion engines, including Hall magnetic engines used by Psyche. The absence of moving parts makes them durable, they consume little fuel, so they are lighter and can be used on smaller spacecraft. Also, they have a futuristic appearance when working.
In 1998, NASA first used an ion engine as the main one on Deep Space 1, a mission to test "various advanced technologies for future interplanetary tasks." In 2007, Dawn became the "first purely scientific" NASA mission to use ion engines for flights until the hydrazine fuel of the attitude control engines ran out.
Ion engines are not powerful enough to launch a rocket from Earth, but they can achieve very high speeds over time in space. NASA reports that Psyche is currently moving at a speed of 37 km per second, or 133,200 km per hour, and will eventually reach almost 200,000 km/hour.
Source: The Verge
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